“I’m all eager for its recap.”

“I deem it a favor for I need to pour out now,” he said. “But should you find it boring, say so by yawning.”

“How can the lessons of life ever sound dull that too of one who lived it and suffered through it?” I said having been affected by what I had seen and heard by then.

“If youth is the cream of life childhood is the cake of it,” he began rewinding the reel of his life. “But where were the birthday bashes with cakes and all in those days. Still, childhood was no poorer in our times either. What did my son Satish gain out of all that gaiety I afforded him as a child? Won’t the kids either sleep or weep as parents grandstand at their birthday bashes? With more money in more hands and fewer children in the parental laps, even the toddlers’ cradle ceremonies are being hosted in the five-star settings. What it is but to announce the couples’ arrival on the grand social stage. How money aids vanity, which in turn sustains variety. But then sans variety, won’t be life ever boring? What a pity, it is man’s lot to take his pick, the vanity of imbalance or the boredom of balance. But as life spares the child its choices, the parents seem to impose their ways on the kids. Well what a childhood I have had!’

“But of late the parents are tending to deprive the children of their childhood by mindless discipline or by over indigence?”

“Sadly so for freedom to act and express is the essence of childhood,” he said throwing more of his money into the fireplace. “Nowadays, while some mold their kids in the crucibles of manners to showcase them as ‘gentlemen prodigies’, most of the rest just give in to every whim and fancy of their kids so as to exhibit them as brilliant models of ‘unbridled originality’. What with the world is in the materialistic fetters, love has come to acquire monitory color, and the parents too have come to believe that by pampering children with what money can buy, they are showering the kids with parental love. Haven’t you heard them say that they didn’t have all those goodies when they were kids, jolly well forgetting that they had childhood for company as they grew up?”

“Sadly for the stupidity of man the kids pay the price of their childhood.”

“If the childhood curiosity is the foundation of life, its façade is designed by the youthful exuberance, but sadly as man, he lets his vanity to transform the edifice into an abode of woes,” he continued. “I think it’s in the village soil that the childhood can be soundly grounded as villages are nearer to nature while the child is a stranger to vanity. But as I left the village at ten into a small town, it was as if I part-distanced myself from nature, and entering adulthood in a big town, I lost the innocence of childhood. Worse still was being wealthy in the middle of my life; why, the later-day success induces man to uproot himself from his past reality and to implant himself in the make-believe terrain of the surreal. How small doth the sense of outgrowing make man really? Yet, the world is crazy to make it big, larger than life itself. It seems that man tends to downsize the things past to make his current holdings seem bigger. What a fallacy! The beauty of life lies in its fulsomeness, well to illustrate it in a weird way, aren’t the skinny things on the ramp an apology to womanliness. And pitiable still are the filthy rich on the corrupt stage of life. What a pity that life robs the rich of its beauty, and what’s worse, entices them with its ugliness.”




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